Ground troops will be pleased to know that the Army’s soldier suit of the future known as the Land Warrior has been given a new lease of life, after the 4/9th Infantry stripped it down and modified it accordingly, making all the modded equipment indispensable in combat. The whole 16-pound ensemble was trimmed down to just 10, while the digital gun scope was abandoned due to its impropriety for urban fights. The need to improvise could see the Army revive the program by opening up their coffers, although doing so is extremely difficult after plopping down half a billion dollars in research over the years. Ah, to revisit an old flame always conjures up unexpected emotions. (Read the full post about ‘Army Soldier Suit Resurrected’…)

I admit the title of this post is a bit cryptic, but bear with me. If you own an inkjet printer, the short video referenced here is worth a look. In case you’re wondering why your printer may be running out of ink quicker than you think it should or maybe just plain not working, take a look as the author rips apart his own printer; this may be why.

(Read the full post about ‘Inkjet Printers suck … down?’…)

Allow me to introduce you to DAVE, the laptop table from IKEA. The 2008 IKEA print catalog shows DAVE in a teenager’s room and only shows white as a color option, but really it is suitable for all ages and also comes in black. I recommend getting the black though since the white could start to look dingy over time with heavy use.  DAVE currently retails for $24.99, which is already a great price for a laptop desk, but DAVE also has good design going for him it. It’s height-adjustable, and the tabletop’s triangular shape will allow it to easily fit into a corner, which could be a perfect storage spot when he it is not in use. (Read the full post about ‘Meet DAVE, IKEA’s laptop table’…)

The Japanese always have the most funky toilet, and the Nankai Electric Railway Co. is going to up the ante by offering water-free urinals at 18 men’s toilets in stations along its lines. Before you start to wrinkle your nose in disgust, check out the main reason for this seemingly unhygienic move. For starters, how does saving 22,000 tons of water and about 6 million yen in utility bills sound to you? These upgraded urinals won’t stink either, since they are covered in a low friction material that ensures condensation does not build up on them, doing away with the need to flush after use. After all, urine will be deposited into special cartridges which help reduce odors. (Read the full post about ‘Water-free Urinals in Japan’…)

Posted Mar 27th 2008 10:29PM by Nilay PatelFiled under: Desktops The last we heard about a consumer-oriented version of Microsoft Surface, Steve Ballmer was saying that the company was trying to get it out ASAP — which is apparently three years, we’ve just learned. That’s the word from Tom Gibbons, the MS VP in charge of Specialized Devices and Applications, who says Microsoft can “absolutely see how” to get Surface to consumers by 2011, but that it’ll try to beat that deadline if possible. Of course, the $10,000 commercial version of Surface still hasn’t been released to high-profile customers like T-Mobile and Harrah’s, and although it’s starting to make semi-random promo appearances here and there. (Read the full post about ‘Surface to hit consumerdom in 2011, maybe sooner’…)

A Google developer recently released Mail Trends, a Phyton based program that analyzes and visualizes email data. Developer Mihai Parparita is associated with Google Reader, so if you are familiar with the Trends page in Google Reader you may see some similarities with the version for Gmail. Google Mail Trends can show distribution data of messages by year, month, day, day of week and time of day as well as distribution of messages by size and a user’s top 40 largest messages. If you want to know the top people you send mail to, you can do so as Google Mail Trends can also show your emails’ incoming and outgoing traffic. To date, Google Mail Trends is only available for Gmail use only. (Read the full post about ‘Google releases Mail Trends for Gmail’…)

So maybe we can’t all be a programming director at a radio station, but anyone can compile an online mixtape. Two new websites that let you do this are Muxtape and Mixwit.  At Muxtape, you can upload up to 12 songs, but you can have no more than one song from any album and you can have only one mixtape per user. Mixwit is a bit fancier in that you can upload your own pictures to use as a skin for your tape in addition to the styles on the site. Both Muxtape and Mixwit join the existing iTape mp3 player type on MyFlashFetish, which lets you add up to 100 songs. As with physical hardcopy mixtapes, you can share your online creations. (Read the full post about ‘Create online mixtapes for your inner DJ’…)

During a recent roundtable discussion, Mozilla CEO John Lilly announced the final release of Firefox 3 will be available in June. According to the timeline Beta 5 is expected to be available in early April and the first Release Candidate (RC1) is expected in the beginning of May. While a Beta 5 will be nice to see, that almost seems like a formality at this point, RC1 will be the nice step (especially for early-adopters) because at that point we will start to see more themes and extensions beginning to work (or work properly) with Firefox 3. Current estimates put the use of Firefox 3 beta 4 at around 700,000 users, which is just a very small portion of the total 160 million people running Firefox. (Read the full post about ‘Mozilla to release Firefox 3 Final in June’…)